As Internet Protocol (IP)-based networks are increasingly deployed, packet-based applications such as voice over IP (VoIP), IP video, video telephony (VT), integrated voice and email, and instant messaging (IM), have emerged. The ability to integrate these services over the same network has become more important as customers appreciate and demand the bundling of multiple services. Many of these services benefit from session based connections between communicating network devices. For example, rather than having each data transmission between two devices be considered independent from each other, a series of data transmissions may be logically grouped together as a session. As session based traffic increases in the network, the problems of how to provide redundancy and load balancing among a cluster of session handling servers have to be addressed.